Saturday, November 29, 2008

An idea

It occurred to me that we do not have great libraries in India and books are not very affordable. However, there's a vast reading public in all the major cities, whose home collections if brought together would provide for an excellent library. With this in mind, I am thinking of the possibility and issues with setting up an intermediary, a company which sets up one or multiple offices in a city(depending on the size of the city) which act as nothing but an exchange medium for books in the following way: People can become members of the library on the company's website. They can then upload the list of books they possess with basic information like author ISBN no. etc: When a user request is placed for a book, the search will retrieve all the sources of the book and the edition/year etc: If they are interested they then place a request for a copy of that book. The source can drop off the book at the nearest office of the company and the requester can pick up the book from the nearest location to the user. The company can commute between its various offices transporting the books. The company would be charging a monthly/annual membership fee and a borrowing fee which will be a fixed daily rate ensuring that the source gets a fee in accordance with the number of days the requester keeps the book and the company gets a commission out of each transaction. Any issues with this? If you can think of none and you are person with entrepreneurial ambitions reading this, you are free to take up the idea and start a company.

3 comments:

Praveen said...

this is a gr8 idea...
we do have gr8 libraries, but its time we revamped it with ideas such as this..kudos

Anonymous said...

Hmmm...

gute Idee
bonne idée
நல்ல ஐடியா!

-Visitor

themiddler said...

Interesting idea! Seems to me like a book sharing service of sorts. Hmm... Personally, I have lots of books that I would not mind swapping. Definitely worth a shot!

I guess the only challenge will be the pricing bit.